#i don't know why i like how they did mountbatten so much i just do

[navree]

rewatching the crown and i’m almost done with season 1 and so far the only characters i don’t want to shake by the shoulders are tommy lascelles, who is a king amongst men, and lord freaking mountbatten

[thewales]

I completely agree with you about the titles, removing them would be an issue, apparently with the Parliament involved? And it would give them more publicity. The BRF should keep ignoring them and just make sure they cannot use “Sussex Royal” on latte packaging or vag candles. I think the review will take care of that.

The Queen wont strip them of the Sussex title but she should. Not using “hrh” did nothing. They still have titles to keep connected with the BRF. In my opinion they are not truly independent until the titles are taken away & they are simply Harry & Meghan Mountbatten-Windsor.

How can their Sussex title be limited without taking it completely away? The Queen shouldve just taken it away. Unless government is the only one who can rid of the dukedom.

Stripping him of his titles is not so easy, that has legal ramifications, parliament would have to get involved and it would be too much work plus there would be the discussion of why they don't do the same with Andrew when his sins are far worse (some might argue that technically he hasn't been charged with anything but that's not a discussion I want to have right now). the limitation of the use of the titles would be basically like the limitation of the use of the HRH style, the titles belong to them but they can't use them in commercial or work scenarios, they should use mounttbatten-widsor if they want to, I'm not sure with the prince title because legally that's  henry’s name, that's how it appears in his birth certificate, so maybe his wife will start calling herself princess of henry? who knows. But I do hope that the Queen will limit the use of his/ their titles, as things stand that seems the most logical result.

[mermaidsirennikita]

Why wasn't Charles allowed to marry Camilla back in the day? I know it was a long time ago, but it was still far past the time when royal marriage alliances were necessary for securing allies or expanding dynasties. I don't think Camilla was a commoner either (or was she?). Why couldn't Charles marry for love? Why exactly was Camilla so objectionable to the BRF?

I love talking about this bc it’s manifold.

The thing is that technically, had Charles married Camilla against the family’s wishes, it would’ve been a big scandal.  But nobody was STOPPING him.  I think that he could’ve married her had he wanted to, and risked being disinherited, to be sure.  But...  the thing is.  That I also don’t think that Elizabeth II would’ve had the balls to tell Charles that he wasn’t going to be king because he married the girl he wanted to marry.  Not after the immense scandal of what happened with David--I don’t believe that she would have disrupted the line of succession in that way, or pushed Charles to give up his claim (because, though David was pushed, he did CHOOSE to abdicate).

Charles just didn’t have the balls.  And arguably, perhaps Camilla wasn’t ready at that point to be queen; Parker-Bowles was still in the mix then, and some biographers have argued that Camilla and Charles didn’t get that serious until after she married Parker-Bowles... Though this is done, I think, to minimize the degree to which Charles KNEW he was doing a fucked up thing by marrying Diana.  I think he wanted to marry Camilla before she married Parker-Bowles, and I think he knew that he wasn’t going to give Camilla up when he married Diana.  I also think that it’s totally possible that Camilla wasn’t ready to marry him quite yet.  She’s a very offbeat woman, and I think canny enough to recognize the magnitude of being Charles’s wife.

And though Charles and Diana’s marriage didn’t secure an ally, it was very much still the last dynastic marriage within the family.  Diana hit a certain criteria--she hailed from an extremely prestigious bloodline that had served royalty for centuries, with connections to the Duke of Devonshire and even the Boleyns.  She was beautiful.  She was virginal.  It was believed that she could be taught.  So it was a marriage made PURELY to further a dynasty, because she was the emblem of the type of queen that dynasty wanted to produce its next generation and indeed its next king.  Though they were politically powerless, the Windsors viewed Charles’s marriage prospects through the lens of breeding and image.  Some have said that his cousin Amanda, granddaughter of his uncle Mountbatten, was proposed to by Charles for exactly this reason.

And the family was worried about the inappropriate love marriage because they did associate it with Wallis Simpson, who even after she was sequestered off to Paris made them look bad, due to Nazi ties, due to the way she and her husband talked shit--so while Elizabeth and Philip married for love, he was also... borderline unsuitable, to be sure, but suitable enough because he came from royalty and he was willing to fall in line, even if he grumbled.

Camilla was openly sexual.  People knew that she was someone slept with men, and this could not be tolerated by the regime, even if one of those men she slept with was Charles.  Her father was an army officer turned businessman, so she was not truly aristocratic, regardless of how much money her parents made.  She was considered, again, offbeat and kooky, so... yes, very much like Charles in that sense but also not what the Windsors wanted.  Because the thing is that whoever married Charles was supposed to prop him up, much like Philip propped Elizabeth up and the Queen Mum propped her husband up.  The Queen Mum was not glamorous, but she was well-bred and extremely charming, knowing exactly how to soothe her husband’s moods and support him on tour.  Philip was a bit rebellious at first and could put his foot in his mouth, but he was also considered this masculine ideal--handsome by the standards of the day, very macho in his naval pursuits, a gregarious and physical man who kind of jazzed up Elizabeth’s image, as she was a plain girl who lacked charisma.  Philip at her side gave her this legitimacy, this desirability, that she lacked naturally.  And it gave the impression of masculine support, which downplayed the issues she possessed as a woman in a position of power, if only a theoretical position.

This kind of suitability mattered deeply to the Windsors, and Philip and Uncle Mountbatten in particular were SO worried about the suitability of Charles’s bride.  Because Charles wasn’t this naturally handsome man.  He was sensitive, and he was awkward, and he seemed to not excel at any of the things Philip wanted him to excel at.  He was not this James Bond-ian figure that Philip tried to be, even as they sold him as one during his “action man” years.  The woman Charles was with needed to support and accent him--they set up him with glamorous, pedigreed socialites who’d be amazing arm candy, while what he wanted was a plain, considerably less refined woman who had something of an imperfect reputation.

That’s why Diana was considered perfect.  She was a 19 year old virgin, so no reputation to speak of.  She was beautiful, but was immediately seen as shy, so she could fade into the background when needed while also emphasizing this idea that Charles was a virile man who could attract the attention of a beautiful woman.  And her blood was extremely blue, to the degree that her father gave a little speech about how her marriage was essentially an extension of the Spencer family tradition of serving the royal family.

And while Camilla was objectionable as a wife, in theory she was not objectionable as a mistress.  Because everyone expected two things if Charles went back to her after his marriage: a) that he’d be satisfied to keep Camilla as a purely secondary side piece, tucked away and very much not his first priority and b) that Diana, the shy, beautiful arm candy, would put up with it.

They were profoundly wrong on both accounts.  Charles did see Camilla as the love of his love, and the more his marriage to Diana was imperfect the more he wanted to be with Camilla and resented that she wasn’t his wife; and Diana not only reacted to Camilla as the mistress, but reacted by raining down hellfire on that family.  Camilla COULD NOT be the mistress, which was a role the royals would have been fine with her taking, and I think many completely expected her to be an adequate, truly secret one.  And mind you, she was bad at being a mistress--talking to Diana way too much before the wedding, provoking her by showing up where she really shouldn’t have.

So basically, a lot of it came down to a misjudgment of Charles (as a man who’d be happy and unromantic enough to keep the woman he really loved as a side piece, while also being noble enough to treat his wife well and work to make her happy affair aside) and Diana (as a meek stand by your man type, who would be happy to have her children and decline to retaliate).  They believed that the scandal of Camilla, a totally unsuitable wife, would outweigh whatever Charles and Camilla could do to each other--especially after Camilla married and the alternative was Charles marrying a woman who’d divorced her husband for him.  They had no concept of how far Charles and Diana would go.  Because Elizabeth II, and Philip, and the Queen Mother, and Uncle Mountbatten, and everyone involved in that whole arrangement, fundamentally misunderstood how people act on emotion.  They also failed to understand how the times were moving on, and why Camilla would have likely been accepted by the punlic.  And ironically?  Now it remains somewhat tense as to whether or not she’ll ever be Queen Camilla, precisely because Charles was denied her originally.

[camillasgirl]

Hi! I have another question: what do you think made Camilla fall for Charles? I mean I know she loved Andrew very much but I suspect that his cheating made her fall out of love from him. Maybe the fact that Charles kept coming back to her made her love him. I don't know. I tried to imagine what went on there. Even if it is not my business, I still love them together very much and I love to imagine how it was.

Hi :)

I have to say I don’t really buy into the whole “Camilla only dated Charles because she wanted to make Andrew jealous”- thing. Yes, she was madly in love with Andrew and his constant flings with other women (Charles’s sister Anne among them) and their on-off relationship must have hurt her immensly, but I don’t think Camilla is that calculating.

We know that Camilla and Charles were introduced by a mutual friend, Lucia Santa Cruz, who had told Charles she had found “just the right girl” for him- and Charles was later quoted “And she really had.” So it was destiny, not calculatio that helped them find each other.  

Maybe the thought of making Andrew jealous did flicker in her head, we’d have to ask her, and if it really did, I think she dropped it after the first or second date because she had really fallen in love with Charles.

As for what made her fall for him… Perhaps it was the fact that Charles was so different from Andrew. Charles was respectful, caring, corteous, attentive, romantic. Andrew (most likely) wasn’t (anymore). Also, they shared the same humour and a lot of interests (being outdoors, horses, painting etc), and I think Charles challenged her views (just as much as she challenged his!). Plus, it’s always nice to know and feel that someone wants and desires you, probably even more if it’s the Prince of Wales (even if your name is Milla Shand and you usually don’t really care for titles and ranks). Charles, too, was a very attractive young man. Probably a bit shy and awkward from time to time, but adorable and definitely good-looking.

Camilla and Charles just clicked. I don’t think there’s much logic behind love. The heart wants what it wants. One day or another you meet someone and your life is changed forever…

She was very much in love with Charles back in the day (still is, very obviously), of that I’m sure, because that’s what several sources say, and that’s the vibe you get when you look at the few pictures from the 70s we have. They trusted and confided in each other, they were equal in their diffrences, and perfectly matched with everything they had in common. In a letter to Lord Mountbatten Charles wrote that his relationship with Camilla was “blissful, peaceful and mutually happy”, and I think that was very, very important to Camilla, too.

We will never know why they really fell for each other, because only two people on Earth know the whole truth: Charles and Camilla. And I’m very certain they will keep their sweet little secret forever.